Glaciers As Global Warming Drama, Part Of The Big Lie

The nonsense about man-caused global warming and climate change just keeps coming.  It is the grandest hoax of our age, and that is saying a lot.  What is the latest outrage to irk me?  Glaciers.  Plain old ice.

Everyone responds to dramatic effects.  The news media knows that.  Hollywood knows that.  We are a culture bred to respond to video or photographic images.  Man was first influenced by verbal story tellers, then accompanied by song, then came the written word, then the drawn or painted visual word, followed by photographs, then moving photographs, now video and everything digitized and available anywhere at the speed of light. 

This is why glaciers are used so often to depict "catastrophic" global warming, because they are visual, huge, dramatic, and awe-inspiring.  Imagine, people take cruises to places like Alaska, Patagonia, Argentina, and Antarctica, for what?  To see big ice cubes (glaciers) melt.  Then they attribute the melting to man's burning of fossil fuels and the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2).  Apparently, many people are so awed by this melting ice they are willing to open their wallets and freely give money to those who promise stop the calamity of big melting ice cubes.  This melting and freezing of glacial ice has always been going on.  It is nothing new.  Al Gore did not invent it.  It is not a catastrophe because President Obama's teleprompter says so, or because John Kerry is instructed to say it is.  It all sounds insane, doesn't it.  Well, it is.

Why do they continue lying to us about global warming and climate change as being (or implied to be) man-caused in articles like the following? The only answer is we are being manipulated. What is the reason? If this effort is based on lies, it is wrong, and our money (taxes) are being taken unfairly and we ought to be outraged. Can it be much simpler than that? Are we so afraid to dissent and disagree that we march along like sheep to the slaughter? Have we as a people, as a nation, sunk so low, become so passive, so obedient? I hope not, even if recent election results seem to indicate otherwise.
Peter

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229752.600-ice-sheets-may-have-already-passed-point-of-no-return.html#.U6uKCjco6eQ

"THE cracks are beginning to show. Greenland's ice sheets slid into the sea 400,000 years ago, when Earth was only a little warmer than it is today. That could mean we are set for a repeat performance.

The finding, along with data from Antarctica, suggests both of Earth's big ice sheets may have already passed a crucial tipping point, condemning them to collapse – either melting, or sliding into the ocean. That will mean sea levels rising by as much as 13 metres, leading to massive coastal flooding. So how fast will the ice collapse, and can we stop it?"

 

(Is the above statement from the linked article complete sensationalist nonsense, or what?  Of course it is, and it is typical of what our young people are being fed and considered science.  Think of what a steady diet of this poison does.  And we wonder why people vote the way they do?  Peter)

Cap-And-Trade Carbon Tax Insanity

Let us hope that the following writer is correct about the failure of the Obama Administration's ability to pass their proposed "cap-and-trade" carbon tax legislation. It truly will be a disaster if it passes. It is becoming clear Obama is taking actions in many areas of the economy without thoroughly considering the consequences. Driving up the cost of energy in a time of economic recession is pure insanity, but that is what is being proposed.
Peter

Obama's Tax Proposals Cap Economic Growth
Donald Lambro Friday, April 03, 2009 (source)

WASHINGTON -- I recently predicted that President Obama's cap-and-trade energy taxes would be the first casualty of his ambitious legislative agenda.
A bipartisan group of Senate Democrats and Republicans drove the first nail into its coffin by adding an amendment to the pending budget resolution. The amendment will deny carbon-emissions-tax supporters the use of a fast-track budget reconciliation rule to limit debate and pass their tax scheme by a simple majority, skirting the tougher 60-vote hurdle to end debate and quickly move to consideration of the measure.

Senate Democratic leaders do not have the 60 votes to bring cap-and-trade to an up-or-down vote. And even if they had 60 members of their party in the Senate, they would lose many, if not most, Midwestern and Gulf State Democrats who fear that Al Gore's so-called climate-change tax scheme on all carbon emissions would be the death knell of their states' oil- and gas-powered economies.

Wednesday's vote on an amendment by Nebraska Republican Sen. Mike Johanns was a major setback for the White House and top Democratic leaders in Congress. Twenty-six Democrats joined 41 Republicans in the 67-31 vote to insert the amendment into the budget resolution.
The Democrat who first predicted the demise of Obama's energy tax is Bill Galston, President Clinton's chief White House domestic policy adviser and a longtime policy strategist (also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution).

"It is gradually dawning on Washington that cap-and-trade legislation won't pass anytime soon -- certainly not this year, and probably not next year either," Galston wrote in a blog last month that was widely read on Capitol Hill and in the White House.
But cap-and-trade is still alive and breathing in the House, where liberal Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts unveiled their 648-page bill last week for rationing energy use in the United States.

Lawmakers in both parties were aghast when they read the bill's fine print. "The Democrats' ruse of an energy plan is nothing more than a regressive tax being offered when families, small businesses and farmers ... can least afford it," said GOP Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri.

"Their proposal will cost any family that turns on a light switch, drives a car, plugs in an appliance, or purchases an American-made item an extra $3,100 a year," he said.
The Waxman-Markey bill would be especially damaging to Blunt's home state where, he said, "almost 90 percent of electricity is coal-generated."

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis of a less-intrusive cap-and-trade plan estimated it would cost about $3,128 per household nationally.
"Waxman and Markey blithely set targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions without any serious analysis or even awareness of the colossal costs of energy rationing to American consumers, workers and industry," said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global-warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

"Beyond these enormous economic costs, Waxman-Markey would put big government in charge of how much energy people can use. It would be the biggest government intervention in people's lives since the Second World War, which was the last time people had to have rationing coupons in order to buy a gallon of gas," Ebell wrote in a CEI analysis of the bill.

But the deep damage Obama's cap-and-trade plan would inflict on our economy goes beyond its draconian carbon taxes. Now we learn that the plan could likely start a trade war.

"The bill as drafted clears the way for carbon protectionism," said CEI senior fellow Iain Murray. "It envisages 'rebates' to companies that have to pay higher costs than their international competitors, which amounts to illegal state aid under World Trade Organization rules."

Last month, Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a House panel that the United States would likely have to raise trade tariffs on carbon-intensive imports as a "weapon" to protect American businesses to "level the playing field" with countries that do not impose similar greenhouse-gas restrictions that the Obama administration envisions here.

"If other countries don't impose a cost on carbon, then we will be at a disadvantage ... (and) we would look at considering perhaps duties that would offset that cost," Chu testified.
That provoked an immediate counter-threat from Li Gao, a top Chinese trade official, who told the Dow Jones news service that a carbon tariff would be a "disaster" that would lead to a trade war.

Obama already appears to have precipitated a trade war with Mexico, which announced it is raising tariffs on $2.4 billion of our exports to their country in retaliation to the administration's latest restrictions on Mexican trucking access to U.S. roads.

"Taken together, these provisions (in the cap-and-trade bill) represent the first shot in what is likely to prove a disastrous carbon trade war," CEI's Murray said.
Meanwhile, if the Johanns amendment survives in the budget resolution, which must be reconciled with the House version, cap-and-trade is all but dead in the Senate. Stay tuned.

Carbon Chastity Required Of True Believers

More reality from Charles Krauthammer. Hopefully our Congressmen and Women read the Washington Post and pay attention to what is being said about the myth of man-caused global warming, and the folly of trying to control the climate.
Peter

OPINION: CARBON CHASTITY - THE FIRST COMMANDMENT OF THE GREEN CHURCH
The Washington Post, 30 May 2008
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/29/AR2008052903266.html
By Charles Krauthammer

I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a global warming denier. I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.

Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems -- from ocean currents to cloud formation -- that no one fully understands. Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative. Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation. "The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity," warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, "is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism."

If you doubt the arrogance, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue. But declaring it closed has its rewards. It not only dismisses skeptics as the running dogs of reaction, i.e., of Exxon, Cheney and now Klaus. By fiat, it also hugely re-empowers the intellectual left.

For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class -- social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies -- arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism). Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history. Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism.

Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but -- even better -- in the name of Earth itself. Environmentalists are Gaia's priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. (See Newsweek above.) And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment -- carbon chastity -- they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.

Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe. There's no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.

So what does the global warming agnostic propose as an alternative?
First, more research -- untainted and reliable -- to determine (a) whether the carbon footprint of man is or is not lost among the massive natural forces (from sunspot activity to ocean currents) that affect climate, and (b) if the human effect is indeed significant, whether the planetary climate system has the homeostatic mechanisms (like the feedback loops in the human body, for example) with which to compensate.

Second, reduce our carbon footprint in the interim by doing the doable, rather than the economically ruinous and socially destructive. The most obvious step is a major move to nuclear power, which to the atmosphere is the cleanest of the clean. But your would-be masters have foreseen this contingency. The Church of the Environment promulgates secondary dogmas as well. One of these is a strict nuclear taboo. Rather convenient, is it not? Take this major coal-substituting fix off the table, and we will be rationing all the more. Guess who does the rationing.
Copyright 2008, WashPost

Barack Obama Buys Into Man-Caused Global Warming Myth

I thought Barack Obama was supposed to be a bright guy, Harvard educated and all. Here he is proposing that power companies and "other industries" pay for their pollution, meaning primarily carbon dioxide emissions. This means he accepts the ludicrous idea that this can stop, or control global warming and climate change. I say this destroys his credibility.
Peter

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/us/politics/09obama.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin


Obama Proposes Capping Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Making Polluters Pay
By JEFF ZELENY
Published: October 9, 2007
WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 — Senator Barack Obama presented a plan on Monday to decrease the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and fight global warming by creating an auction system requiring power companies and other industries to pay for their pollution. By the year 2020, he said, emissions would be reduced to levels from 1990.

In a speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate from Illinois, called for imposing a national cap on carbon emissions, investing $150 billion over 10 years to develop new energy sources and reducing dependence on foreign oil by 35 percent by 2030.
“No business will be allowed to emit any greenhouse gases for free,” Mr. Obama said in Portsmouth, N.H. “Businesses don’t own the sky, the public does, and if we want them to stop polluting it, we have to put a price on all pollution.”

The energy speech was the latest effort by Mr. Obama to cast himself as a critic of how business has been conducted in Washington. Every president since Gerald R. Ford, Mr. Obama argued, has pledged to curb fossil fuel use, but the United States’ dependence on foreign oil has climbed.
He proposed instituting a mandatory “cap and trade” program across the economy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the level recommended by top scientists, a figure that he did not specify Monday. Under his plan, businesses would be required to buy allowances to pollute, which would create financial incentives to limit energy use or reduce emissions.

Mr. Obama said if he was elected, the government would set a national cap on carbon emissions, which by 2050 would be reduced to 80 percent below the levels in 1990. Though he did not mention his campaign rivals by name, Mr. Obama criticized those who opposed gradual increases in gasoline mileage standards for cars, which included Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

“When they had the chance to stand up and require automakers to raise their fuel standards, they refused,” Mr. Obama said. “When they had multiple chances to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by investing in renewable fuels that we can literally grow right here in America, they said no.”

Mr. Obama, who had faced criticism from some environmental groups for supporting the Bush administration’s energy bill in 2005 and for pushing legislation to help Illinois’ coal industry, was praised Monday by the League of Conservation Voters, an independent group. The group’s president, Gene Karpinski, said, “By embracing a mandatory cap-and-trade program, the Obama energy plan would provide incentives to cut production of carbon dioxide and other pollutants that cause global warming.”

In Iowa, meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton began a “rebuilding the middle class” bus tour on Monday that included a 50-minute speech on economic prosperity with new proposals to benefit unions and homeowners in particular.
Speaking in Cedar Rapids, she called for reviewing pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement every five years — not as aggressive a position as John Edwards’s call for renegotiating Nafta or Representative Dennis J. Kucinich’s call for canceling it, but an idea that received applause nonetheless.

And she proposed giving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac new flexibility to help companies and homeowners replace expiring adjustable-rate mortgages with fixed-rate loans.
Patrick Healy contributed reporting from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Stop Global Warming Hysteria

There are many reasons why the stop global warming movement is a farce. It is not only scientists who disagree with the notion that humans are causing global warming with carbon dioxide emissions, it is not just scientists who contend global warming is a naturally occurring phenomena, it is more and more economists recognizing that it is a very bad idea to raise taxes, while crippling the economy in a vain attempt to stop global warming.
Peter


Global Warming Hysteria
By Walter E. Williams CNSNews.com Commentary September 27, 2007

Despite increasing evidence that man-made CO2 is not a significant greenhouse gas and contributor to climate change, politicians and others who wish to control our lives must maintain that it is.

According to the Detroit Free Press, Rep. John Dingell wants a 50-cents-a-gallon tax on gasoline. We've heard such calls before, but there's a new twist. Dingell also wants to eliminate the mortgage tax deduction on what he calls "McMansions," homes that are 3,000 square feet and larger. That's because larger homes use more energy. One might wonder about Dingell's magnanimity in increasing taxes for only homes 3,000 feet or larger. The average U.S. home is around 2,300 square feet, compared with Europe's average of 1,000 square feet. So why doesn't Dingell call for disallowing mortgage deductions on houses more than 1,000 square feet? The reason is there would be too much political resistance, since more Americans own homes under 3,000 square feet than over 3,000. The full agenda is to start out with 3,000 square feet and later lower it in increments.

Our buying into global warming hysteria will allow politicians to do just about anything, upon which they can muster a majority vote, in the name of fighting climate change as a means to raise taxes.

In addition to excuses to raise taxes, congressmen are using climate change hysteria to funnel money into their districts. Rep. David L. Hobson, R-Ohio, secured $500,000 for a geothermal demonstration project. Rep. Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif., got $500,000 for a fuel-cell project by Superprotonic, a Pasadena company started by Caltech scientists. Money for similar boondoggles is being called for by members of both parties.

There are many ways to reduce CO2 emissions, and being 71 years of age I know many of them. Al Gore might even consider me carbon neutral and possibly having carbon credits because my carbon offsets were made in advance. For example, for the first 15 years of my life, I didn't use energy-consuming refrigerators; we had an icebox. For two decades I listened to radio instead of watching television and walked or used public transportation to most places. And for more than half my life I didn't use energy-consuming things such as computers, clothes dryers, air conditioning and microwave ovens. Of course, my standard of living was much lower.

The bottom line is, serious efforts to reduce CO2 will lead to lower living standards through higher costs of living. And it will be all for naught because there is little or no relationship between man-made CO2 emissions and climate change.

There's an excellent booklet available from the National Center for Policy Analysis (ncpa.org) titled "A Global Warming Primer." Some of its highlights are:

• --"Over long periods of time, there is no close relationship between CO2 levels and temperature."
• -- "Humans contribute approximately 3.4 percent of annual CO2 levels" compared to 96.6 percent by nature.
• -- "There was an explosion of life forms 550 million years ago (Cambrian Period) when CO2 levels were 18 times higher than today. During the Jurassic Period, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, CO2 levels were as much as nine times higher than today."

What about public school teachers frightening little children with tales of cute polar bears dying because of global warming? The primer says, "Polar bear numbers increased dramatically from around 5,000 in 1950 to as many as 25,000 today, higher than any time in the 20th century."

The primer gives detailed sources for all of its findings, and it supplies us with information we can use to stop politicians and their environmental extremists from doing a rope-a-dope on us.

(Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Media Research Center's Business & Media Institute. The views expressed are those of the writer.)

Payback Time: Democrats Plan To Tax Oil and Gas, While Subsidizing Alterntive Energy

This a rather long article and hints at the changes coming in US Energy Policy. The one thing people can be sure of is our energy will cost us more. Does anyone think that new taxes on oil and gas companies will not be passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices?

Is it smart for the government to tax the public (which is the ultimate effect of subsidies) to pay for unprofitable alternative energy sources? Will these taxes really significantly reduce our "dependence on foreign oil"? Will this shift in government spending really control "global warming"?

The bills essentially transfer billions of dollars from oil and gas companies to producers of "renewable fuels". This is like "robbing Peter to Pay Paul". Is it any wonder why the large oil and gas companies are investing in solar, wind, ethanol, and coal-to diesel technology. They'll be taxed in one area and rewarded in another, maintaining their profits, while the consumer continues paying more.

Or is all of this political gamesmanship, and as some Democrats are saying, "it's payback time", (no doubt with big grins on their faces)? Does any of this make sense to you? Is there a better way?
Peter

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/18/washington/18oil.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th

Democrats Press Plan to Channel Billions in Oil Subsidies to Renewable Fuels
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Published: June 18, 2007
WASHINGTON, June 16 — Senate Democrats are seeking a major reversal of energy tax policies that would take billions of dollars in tax breaks and other benefits from the oil industry to underwrite renewable fuels.

The tax increases would reverse incentives passed as recently as three years ago to increase domestic exploration and production of oil and gas. The change reflects a shift from the Republican focus on expanding oil production to the Democratic concern about reducing global warming.

On Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee will take up a bill that would raise about $14 billion from oil companies over 10 years and would give about the same amount of money on new incentives for solar power, wind power, cellulosic ethanol and numerous other renewable energy sources. The bill is one of the signature issues this year for Democrats, along with immigration and the war in Iraq, and one in which they hope to clearly distinguish themselves from the Republicans.

But Senate Democrats are expected to go beyond the $14 billion in tax changes in the draft bill. Democratic officials said the committee is all but certain to adopt a proposal by Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico that would raise $10 billion from companies that drill for oil and gas in federal waters but do not currently pay royalties to the government.

“We are cutting back subsidies for the oil and gas industry and using that money to finance the development of new and cleaner sources of energy,” said Mr. Bingaman, who plans to attach the entire tax package to the energy bill on the Senate floor next week.
It is unclear how much President Bush or Republicans in Congress will fight the proposed tax shift. The ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, has already endorsed the $14 billion package.

But the plan could easily founder because of opposition to any one of many hotly disputed provisions in the broader energy bill. Just last week, a threatened filibuster by Republicans forced Democrats to postpone a floor vote on requiring electric utilities to produce 15 percent of their power from renewable fuels. The White House, meanwhile, has threatened to veto the bill if lawmakers do not drop a provision intended to prosecute what Democrats call “unconscionably excessive” gasoline prices.

Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York has proposed that oil companies be prohibited from using an accounting method called “last in, first out” for inventories that saves them as much as $5 billion in taxes a year.
Because Senate Democrats want to offset the cost of any new tax breaks with tax increases elsewhere, many lawmakers are pushing for even more tax raises from oil companies.
Oil executives are protesting loudly, saying that the proposed changes would take money away from exploring and drilling in the United States and increase the nation’s dependence on imported foreign oil.

“They talk about our companies as if they’re owned by space aliens,” said John Felmy, chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association. “They talk about energy security, but these provisions could have the opposite effect in terms of reducing our production here and increasing our imports.”
The oil industry has ample reason to worry. With consumers seething about gasoline prices increasing to more than $3 a gallon and oil profits reaching record highs, oil companies would be short of friends in Congress regardless of the party in power.

Beyond the immediate jockeying, however, lies a bigger question: Is Congress putting taxpayers at risk by funneling billions of dollars in subsidies into alternative fuels that are still a long way from being profitable?
Indeed, industry experts said the Senate bill greatly understated the true cost of incentives for renewable fuels. Most of the incentives are set to expire at the end of 2009 or 2010, but Democrats in both the House and Senate have called for an increase in the production of such fuels by 2022. As a practical matter, the vast majority of “temporary” tax breaks are routinely extended once they are passed for the first time.

In addition to higher taxes for oil companies, House and Senate Democrats are hitting at the oil industry in other ways. The Senate bill would give the federal government more power to prosecute companies that engage in “price gouging” on gasoline prices, which is broadly defined in the bill as charging “unconscionably excessive” prices that reflect “unfair leverage.” A similar measure is moving through the House.

Separately, the House Natural Resources Committee passed a bill last week that would, among other things, crack down on companies that cheat on royalties they pay for oil and gas pumped on publicly owned land.
In effect, the various bills would transfer billions of dollars from oil companies to producers of renewable fuels.

The Senate bill would offer $5.6 billion in tax credits over the next three years for companies that produce electricity from renewable fuels like wind and geothermal power. It would offer tax-free bonds for new power plants with renewable or clean energy. It would offer tax credits totaling about a dollar a gallon to producers of cellulosic ethanol, and even bigger tax credits for “biodiesel” fuel. It would extend and expand tax breaks for plug-in electric cars and other vehicles that use alternative energy sources, and it would provide tax breaks for gas stations that offer renewable fuels.

(Page 2 of 2)
In a nod to the politically powerful coal industry, the bill would also provide $1.5 billion in tax-free “clean coal bonds” for advanced coal-fired electricity plants and $332 million in tax credits for plants that make diesel fuel from coal.
Times Topics: Energy and Power
Democrats in the House are moving with similar legislation. The House passed a bill earlier this year that would raise about $14 billion over 10 years from oil companies, and the House Ways and Means Committee is expected to mark up a new tax bill that would offer rich incentives for alternative fuels and increased efficiency.

The Democratic bill contrasts sharply with the energy bill that the Republican-led Congress passed in 2005. The Senate bill offers less than $1 billion in incentives for coal, no tax breaks for nuclear power and tax hikes for oil. But two years ago, Congress approved $11 billion in additional tax breaks, of which $7 billion went to oil, coal and nuclear power.

“It is a dramatic change in policy, targeted at the big oil companies,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. “It will show the country the kind of things we can do by taking away subsidies for fossil fuels and putting the money into new sources of energy.”
Privately, some Democrats say it is payback time: the oil industry’s political contributions have overwhelmingly gone to Republican lawmakers and President Bush, and many Democrats say they have little sympathy for the industry now.

It is unclear whether Republicans or Mr. Bush plan to protect the industry.
In stinging criticism earlier this month, the White House Office of Management and Budget said the proposed price-gouging measure amounted to price regulation that would jeopardize investment in oil production and ultimately hurt consumers.
In 2005, Mr. Bush threatened to veto a one-year measure that blocked oil companies from using the “last in, first out” accounting method for inventories. The Bush administration, echoing charges by the oil industry, said the measure amounted to a one-year windfall profits tax that would frighten investors by raising the prospect of further tax raises whenever oil prices jumped sharply.
Mr. Schumer’s proposal is similar to the 2005 proposal, except that his measure would be permanent.

The oil industry still has persuasive clout in Washington. Exxon, Shell and trade groups like the American Petroleum Institute have hired former Democratic lawmakers and Democratic lobbyists to help press their case.
They have carefully positioned themselves, picking their fights on selected issues that attract fairly little popular interest but affect potentially large amounts of money.
The effort is mostly defensive — fending off tax increases — but also has offensive elements. Royal Dutch Shell and other big companies hope to be big players in coal-based liquid fuels. And the industry in general is still pushing for Congress to open up more areas on the outer continental shelf for deepwater drilling.

But industry executives hold out little hope for emerging unscathed.

Save The Rainforests: Is This the Answer? Essentially More Taxes?

Here is another opinion from the NY Times. The authors suggest that rich countries, (polluters) should buy carbon "credits" for emitting carbon dioxide. In other words, they pay X amount of dollars for creating Y amount of carbon emissions. This money then goes to pay poorer countries NOT to cut their rain forests down. This is like paying farmers not to grow crops. It is paying the poorer countries for doing nothing. Imagine the opportunity for corruption. Do you think the farmers in the poorer countries will see any of that money?

To me this is promoting one huge global welfare state. Is that what we really want?
Peter

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/opinion/16powers-hurowitz.html?th&emc=th

Op-Ed Contributors
Home on the Rainforest

By WILLIAM POWERS and GLENN HUROWITZ
Published: June 16, 2007
DEEP within Madagascar, more than 1,300 square miles of rainforest continue to breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen every day, helping to keep the planet cool. That may not seem like a big achievement for a bunch of trees, but elsewhere around the world tropical forests like this one are being felled to make way for timber and mining operations, cattle ranches and, increasingly, sugar and palm oil plantations to fuel the world’s growing thirst for ethanol.

So how did this particular rainforest — a tropical paradise whose canopy teems with rare lemurs and serpent eagles — avoid destruction? Its survival is the fruit of one of the first experiments in carbon ranching: allowing polluters to make up for their greenhouse gas emissions by paying third world countries like Madagascar to preserve their tropical forests. Madagascar uses the money it gets from multinational corporations to safeguard the forest and pay for poverty reduction programs.

Programs like this represent the world’s best hope to save vanishing tropical forests and avert global climate catastrophe. It’s vital that the senators and representatives now racing to create new climate legislation include incentives for carbon ranching. Otherwise they will not come up with the comprehensive solution that’s needed to address the climate crisis. Despite all the attention paid to China’s industrial pollution splurge, that country’s inefficient factories, power plants and vehicles don’t contribute as much to global warming as the destruction of the world’s tropical forests does.

Reversing tropical deforestation could be surprisingly cheap and easy because it can be driven by simple economics. Right now, it’s worth more to a logging company or a peasant to convert the rainforest to stumps or soybeans than it is to leave that rainforest intact. One hectare (about 2.5 acres) of forest cleared and converted to ranchland or crops produces a piece of land worth, on average, $200 to $500. But that’s nothing compared to the value of preserving the rainforest as a sponge for carbon dioxide.

On European markets, the right to emit one ton of carbon dioxide trades today at more than $20. With each hectare of intact rainforest storing around 500 tons of carbon dioxide, that means that each hectare has a value of $10,000 as carbon dioxide storage, far more than the value of even the most productive tea or soy plantation.

As a recent World Bank report put it, “Farmers are destroying a $10,000 asset to create one worth $200.” To the farmer or agribusiness corporation, of course, that makes perfect sense, because that $10,000 is all theoretical. It can’t put food on the table or deliver dividends to shareholders.

That’s got to change — or we could see the rapid disappearance of much of the world’s remaining tropical forests and the oxygen and animal habitat they provide.
The indigenous people who make the world’s forests their home are retreating in the face of agricultural expansion. Their interactions with loggers, miners and ranchers are destroying their cultures and bringing disease to their communities. By providing powerful incentives to leave the forests intact, carbon ranching can allow these people and their cultures to survive as well.
Carbon ranching would also be a good way to bring the developing world into the effort to reduce emissions. A coalition of “rainforest nations” led by Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica has indicated it will participate in carbon ranching projects without demanding any increase in foreign aid.

Corporate polluters also like carbon ranching because conserving rainforest is often cheaper than reducing their own emissions. Some, like Mitsubishi in Madagascar, are already doing it voluntarily because they want to be seen as supporting environmental efforts and anticipate that future legislation will let them get credit for it. Crucially, support from business guarantees that the idea will get a hearing in this polluter-friendly White House.

Indeed, the Bush administration has already financed some relatively small tropical forest conservation projects — most recently forgiving $24 million of Guatemala’s debt in exchange for that country’s putting the money toward conservation. So carbon ranching may provide a rare piece of common ground for the president and Congress.

To be effective, however, any legislation must include certain safeguards. First, no polluter should be allowed a free pass on cleaning up its own industrial pollution just because it protects rainforest — saving tropical forests should be part of the climate equation, not the whole equation.

Second, if a company pays to protect a forest that for whatever reason ends up getting destroyed anyway — as the politics or economics of the tropical country change — both the company and the country should face strict financial penalties. That would provide a powerful incentive to make sure those forests stay protected.

Time is short. The world’s rainforests are shrinking. With global temperatures rising rapidly, it’s essential that Congress and President Bush act quickly before the vast forests that cool the planet disappear forever.

William Powers is the author, most recently, of “Whispering in the Giant’s Ear.” Glenn Hurowitz is working on a book about the importance of courage in Democratic Party politics.